


Chase the Wind

by sassycatpants



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: AUs, Gen, drabble headcanon collection, friends with benefits relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-19 17:12:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 4,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13128042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassycatpants/pseuds/sassycatpants
Summary: She onlines to fire and heavy silence.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Don't mind me; this is more a collection place for me to dump all of my headcanon and drabble writing prompts for my RP blog for ease of access when I need to remember a specific event/memory for my muse than anything else. It's also a multiverse blog, so some of the writings exist in different universes than the rest.

She onlines to fire and heavy silence, distant gunfire and explosions suddenly rocking the ground the only voices there to welcome her to existence.

surrounded by mangled frames and freshly spilled energon, she’s alone for only a moment; the scream of a jet overhead and the rumble of engines below and suddenly she’s not alone anymore.

fleetingly she thinks the one with wheels looks kinder but the sky is calling and she throws herself upwards to answer it; the choice is made before she even knew she had one to make and there is no turning back now.

she fights a war, and doesn’t know why she’s fighting it but that’s fine; she was born of ashes and smoke and she doesn’t know anything else anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

_{”You’re the lightest lightweight drinker I have **ever**  met, Sparkles.”_

_“Shuddup,” the seeker slurred, flicking wings dismissively as she slumped over the nearest bot. Beside her, the two seekers laughed, one clapping her on the back and getting a faceful of wing for his trouble as she smacked him with the limp appendage. “Y’both’re – ugh. Slagsuckers, both’f you.”  
_

_A glass slid closer to her, and despite her inebriated state, Sparkplug lifted one hand to clumsily wrap talons around the glass, lifting her head to sip from the straw dutifully. One didn’t waste free drinks. Alternator had made sure she knew that rule before they’d joined the fireside drinkers, hours ago. Gasket, somewhere in the crowd, called out to the both of them and moments later she found herself hauled to her feet by her laughing trinemate._

_“Looks like it’s time for us to go,” Alternator says cheerfully, waving their goodbyes as Sparkplug stumbled alongside him.  
_

_“Hate you,” she grumbled, leaning against his side heavily and allowing her second to take her weight. She hears him laugh against her audial.  
_

_“You’ll hate me more in the morning, love. Promise.”}  
_

Early morning sunlight wakes her, the unwelcome ‘ _dreams’_  of old memory files fading back into her processor’s archives where they belonged as the small seeker reflected bitterly that the Alternator of her memory-dreams had been right.

_(She hated them for leaving her alone, and herself for being unable to save them.)_


	3. Chapter 3

_“It’s alright – I got’cha Sparkles, you’re safe now. Vent, that’s it. Nice and slow.” Sparkplug can feel Alternator’s hands across her back and on her wings as he keeps her on her wings; his steady bulk hovering beside her does more to calm her churning tanks and pulsing spark than his words._

_She still feels like she’s being dragged down by her own weight, liquid and salt pouring into her vents for the seconds stretching into eternity before she’d managed to force all of them closed and stop it. The phantom sensation of water pressing around her, crushing her, makes her vents hitch and Sparkplug wobbles dangerously. Talons fly out to latch onto her trinemate’s armor, digging into his seams almost painfully but Alternator stays where he is and lets the smaller seeker cling as she rides out the waves of panic. Gasket’s hands join his on Sparkplug’s wings; sharp claws draw soothing circles against the metal and slowly she opens her optics._

_Vents open one by one to expel the last bits of trapped water and she shudders under the feel of it leaking from the openings._

_Far below, waves crash against the surface of the water as they travel out of sight._


	4. 39. Out Of Time

they see the glint of light off a sniper’s rifle in the distance, but the warning comes too late. A surge of desperation across their trinebond, a wordless cry echoing between and through them before phantom pain in their wing to match the ragged remains of alternator’s left wing.

he goes down and they bank sharply, two voices joined in a shriek as they dive after him; gasket flips into root mode, straining arms out to reach their trinemate, to catch him before they can hit the ground very far below but it’s  _too late, no time they’re going to hit the ground, he won’t reach him in time **h̢͟elp̢ ̸̨me ̡͘͟help̡̕͘ ̴̴͡u͝s̨**_ as gasket finally manages to reach alternator, and she’s only seconds behind, reaching for them both –

her fear gives her more speed, and all she can hear is the wind screaming past her audials and the pulse of the bond

_another rifle shot, and her spark stutters in its casing as two sparks suddenly go out and the bond **snaps** , flailing against the edges of nothing where there should be something_

she’s still diving, voicing her rage.

(the shriek of an enraged seeker is frightening, when she’s chasing the bodies of her trine falling out of the sky)

_:: f͡aile̵d ̧no, ͝fl̢y,͟ do҉n͜'t̷ leave ̷m͏e ͜b̡e҉hi͘n̢d AL̴T̢ER͞NATOR̸ ̡G̨AŞK̢ET̡ ::_

she keens, voice warbling through static, as they hit the ground below, pulling up sharply and skimming the surface to slam into already greying shells. the light glints off the sniper’s rifle once more in the distance, and her optics zero in on the mech she can see now, no longer hidden from view.

she’s going to kill him.

she’s going to kill him.

_she’s going to kill him._

_::i̠̤'̨m̲̼ g͕̗̙̩o̭̰̜̬i̛̺͔n̟̩g̮͡ ͈̪͓t̫o̩̞̫̞ ̯̼͉̬̖k̵̺i͙̜̠̣͇l̜l̯͕ ̝̦y̯͔͇̬͚̭͈o͎͓̹̱̯u͔̖̲̭̼͎̺::_


	5. Chapter 5

she’d been utterly fearless once, but that was a long time ago, when  _‘she’_ had been  _‘they’_  and ‘ _one’_  meant ‘ _three’_. when flying was two pairs of trusted wings at her back, weaving through smoke and fire.

one just means one, now. small and alone and completely quiet inside her head without two other voices chattering away; the frayed edges of herself trail out into the void where the other pieces no longer exist. she isn’t fearless now.

(it doesn’t feel natural to be so  _alone_ )

these days, there are no wings at her back except her own.

(sometimes she wonders if she’ll ever be a  _‘they’_ again.

and she’s  _so afraid_  the answer will be  **no** )


	6. Chapter 6

she isn’t sure, at first, where she stands with them; two autobots and what’s left of her command trine the only people on this entire planet she can count on not to offline her on sight, and she has no idea how far that trust can extend before it snaps.

she looks to skywarp and thundercracker for direction but they seem just as lost, snarling and snapping and irritable with everything around them as they try to settle into this new reality of trusting autobots and being _two-instead-of-three._

(she considers telling them how the ache will never go away, how they’ll slowly stop reaching out for starscream but it will  **never**  get better, but she refrains. they still have each other, and somewhere in her spark she’s bitterly envious that they still have at least half a trine together, when she has nothing)

they’re all learning where the limits are, what is okay and what is not. they make the mistakes, cross the wrong lines only to erase and redraw them entirely as they go; they learn slowly.

eventually, the boundaries blur away and there are no lines left.

(she finds she likes it better this way.)


	7. Chapter 7

she’s heard it said that seekers can die of loneliness. wither away, fade into nothing from the sheer weight of it, they say.

she’s wrapped up safely in the heart of her trine,  _three-as-one_  and  _loneliness_  is as foreign a concept to her as flying is to fish.

then  _we_  becomes  _i,_ and suddenly loneliness is uncomfortably familiar _._

she still reaches out for them reflexively, expecting fields and sparks and minds where there is nothing; slowly, over time she stops reaching. she considers letting herself be crushed by the weight of it. instead she picks herself back up and keeps going.

there’s a spark she wants to put her talons through.

seekers, she’ll tell wheeljack a long time later, can definitely die of loneliness.


	8. Chapter 8

_“It’s not Cybertron’s sky, so the starfields aren’t the same,” Wheeljack told her, hand reaching towards the sky to trace out familiar shapes in the unfamiliar stars. “But all it takes is a bit of imagination and you can form any picture you want from any starfield! Even constellations from Cybertron.”_

_Sparkplug watched the way his fingers moved across a foreign night sky, painting vivid pictures of constellations she’d never had a chance to learn from a sky she’d barely known. Wheeljack was always in motion, always rushing forward towards his next great invention, hands fluttering every which way as he told anyone who would listen what remarkable idea he was in the middle of having, she remembers._

_That night, peering out the broken windows of a dilapidated barn in the middle of nowhere, there were no great inventions or exciting experiments. There was only Wheeljack and Sparkplug in the dark, motionless but for his hands as they guided her through his pictures in the sky._

_(It wasn’t love, not yet, but it was the beginning.)_


	9. 18. Love

loving drift is a strange combination of  _warmth-trust-fear-faith_  that she’s not quite sure how to feel about.

and she does love him, oh so very much. he’s  _good_  and  _kind_  the way she’s had so little of before her makeshift family and the slip between places, and it’d be so very  _easy_  to love him just a little bit more but – she’s content with loving him just the way she does, instead. she doesn’t want more than that, because she knows they wouldn’t  _fit_ , not really. her empty spaces aren’t his to fill, and she won’t ask him to try.

drift, she thinks, does well at pretending to be a mountain; rock solid and steady when the rest of the world isn’t. she’s grateful for it, those days when she  _needs_  the mountain more than she needs the sky and the wind, something to hold onto when she doesn’t think her wings can hold her anymore. it’s strange and terrifying, to have that much faith in someone else after so long without.

truthfully though, she prefers when he stops hiding all of his own dark places and empty spaces. she can’t fix them anymore than he can fix hers, but she  _understands_  them. and that’s the real drift, the best friend she loves more than anything.

(sometimes she wonders if he sees in her what she sees in him; whether he recognizes the same aching  _loneliness_  in her that she thinks she sometimes glimpses in him.

she’s good at making people see what she wants them to see most of the time, but sometimes

 _sometimes_  she wants someone else to see more than she’s willing to show them. sparkplug thinks drift does, but she’s just as good at self delusion as she is at deflecting others, so maybe she’s just seeing what she wants to see. but she’s too afraid to look too close and discover that truth, so she doesn’t.)


	10. 98. Game

_over there, black and white – Prowl – close to base, won’t catch him in time unless – yes, left here and then –_

she ducks around a group of strange shapes that on an organic planet might be considered trees, and creeps forward. Prowl hasn’t noticed her yet and she angles her wings, a sharp grin crossing her face. she’s going to catch him unawares this time.

(it feels a little like victory, catching Prowl with his doorwings down)

_not yet, not yet not yet not – **now**!_

a crash as she slams into the other mech, laughing.

“got you! another point for me!”


	11. Chapter 11

The seeker stood for a moment in front of the bunker doors, one hand resting flat against them as she stared into the distance and let her mind wander in circles.

She didn’t quite understand how it’d happened – one explosion, just  _one_  and… Wheeljack,  _her Wheeljack_ , was gone. He’d survived hundreds or more of the damn things but – not this one? Not this time? 

What was she going to tell the others, once she finally found them?  _If_  she ever found them. Would she even be able to bring them anymore, without Wheeljack’s silly little science? Gently, claws dragged down the door leaving behind only scored metal as she dropped her hand back to her side and rocked on her thrusters. There wasn’t going to be any more science experiments, or explosions or silly arts and crafts and glitter passed off as science to annoy Prowl and Ratchet or pranks planned on Skywarp or –

_Primus_ , how was she supposed to tell any of them that he was gone, that she hadn’t even – hadn’t kept him  **safe**? Not even from himself.

Sparkplug was lost, and the only piece of home that had managed to  _find her was dead_ , and she had no idea what to do now.

Carefully, ever so gentle, she closed her talons around the last, great invention Wheeljack had ever made. The last gift he’d given her.

(She was  **going**  to find them, and bring them here and they’d mourn Wheeljack but they’d have a home again. He’d given them that, when he’d given her the device that let her explore the multiverse.)


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IDW/MTMTE verse, rather than her main Tyran/Prime fusion verse. Same basic background, different events and circumstances.

Sparkplug stares up into space, optics focused on the distant point in the sky where she had last seen the ship for hours turned days. She doesn’t move, watching and waiting and  _hoping_  – but they aren’t coming back, and eventually it sinks in.

She’s been left behind.

(The sounds of an enraged seeker echoes over the deserted battlefield, the dead the only witnesses to her fury before it’s finally spent. She’s left, aching and alone, to find somewhere safe from the ravages of the weather.)

* * *

There’s no point to tracking the days; her chronometer was broken during that last battle, and she has no idea how many had blurred together while she watched the skies for a ship that was never coming. She’d lost even more time wandering aimlessly through a half burnt forest until settling inside the cave.

There’s nothing to count  _for_ , beyond her next meal. So Sparkplug spends her time siphoning bodies and exploring the planet she’s certain she’s going to die on. It’s a nice enough place, she supposes.

* * *

She talks to herself often. There’s no one else there, and the silence is too thick and heavy for her to bear for long. So she makes do with what she has, holding entire conversations with herself, and eventually with people who no longer exist.

Sometimes if she stays still and looks only from the corner of her optics, she thinks she can still see them on either side. They’re never there when Sparkplug turns her head though, and she wears grooves into her own plating under her talons when things get too boring. Replacing the ruined plating later at least gives her something to do.

She thinks she might finally be going mad.

* * *

A ship arrives. For a long time, Sparkplug hides behind the rocks and trees and just watches, wondering if this is another delusion flickering through her processor. She’s been having them more often lately, and sometimes it takes days before she realizes none of it is real.

Red and gold plating catches her optic, and Sparkplug tilts her head for a moment as she watches him. He’s shiny and bright and they keep calling him  _Captain_.

 _Captain means he gets to decide who gets on_. The realization clicks into place sluggishly, and the seeker smiles slowly. If she can get him to agree, then maybe she’ll finally get off this planet. Then she can track down Deadlock and make him  _regret_  leaving her behind to die like he had.

With a shiny new future waiting for her, Sparkplug tackles the red and gold bot.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another IDW/MTMTE verse drabble; it's a response to a drabble meme prompt. Be aware it's vaguely nsfw!

They have an unspoken agreement formed of unfulfilled needs and unvoiced understanding, a sort of trust they don’t share with anyone else because no one else on the  _Lost Light_ shares that crucial foundation of shared history theirs is built on.

This isn’t the first time Sparkplug has found herself in Drift’s hab, both of them three hard engexes too drunk to care that her wings are scrunched almost painfully against the speedster’s blanket hoard or that her talons are scraping paint off his helm every time they curl. She’s floating and she feels good, and that’s the entire point of being here.

Sparkplug laughs when Drift finally sits up, clumsily pouring another shot of Nightmare Fuel. There’s a quip about washing down the taste on the top of her glossa, instead she swallows it down in favor of chasing the splash of alcohol down his chassis instead when he misses his mouth the first time. The seeker feels his engine rev – presses one servo firmly to his chest until he moves with it, glass abandoned to the floor, and straddles him with a grin.

“I’ll take one shot every time you make me overload,” she murmurs, leaning to press her mouth against a finial. “But you gotta keep your hands up,” one talon taps the berth above his helm. “Here the whole time or it won’t count.”

Sparkplug ignores the fluttering in her spark when he laughs.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand a TF: Prime au where Sparkplug is a seer who imparts prophecies via throw away comments. One of my Optimi partners and I discussed at one point (with a lot of yelling) about what if she was Unicron's mortal avatar and that's why she has the visions, rather than bring a gift of Primuis.

He piles his hopes ever higher on her shoulders; Sparkplug knows he doesn’t mean to, that he had every intention of letting her live in peace and that if she asked, he would gladly send her on her way to some remote colony to be left alone for the rest of her days. She’s  _seen_  it more than once, paths she decides not to take.

She can’t bring herself to turn away from him when he looks to her like she has the answer to every question he’s ever asked. To Optimus, she’s a miracle from Primus that may just win them this war, even if he never says it aloud.

But she isn’t a Primus-given gift. And that’s why she shatters every belief he’s ever had about her.

“My visions aren’t from Primus. I was forged by Unicron.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AU version of Sparky's IDW verse where she wingmans for Drift and Rodimus and then leaves the Lost Light and ends up working in Blurr's bar.

She watches the way they gravitate together, everyone else forgotten the moment one of them sees the other; she watches and observes and the knowledge that there’s no place for her with either of them slips in uninvited to settle against her spark.

_(There’s shards of glass in her mouth, splinters digging into her glossa every time she smiles but that’s fine. She just swallows the energon as it wells and keeps going._

_There are no heroes here and you just gotta keep moving and save yourself. This is a truth she’s always known.)_

And once she’s sure they are, she leaves. Says her goodbyes and stuffs what few things she’s gathered into her subspace and steps off the  _Lost Light_  and onto Cybertron. She hasn’t been here in a long time, and it’s different to the Cybertron she remembers – war torn, fire and ash in the skies – but it’s nice and a fresh start. Sparky doesn’t wait around for anyone to come after her, taking off into the crowd.

She certainly doesn’t look back or stay to watch them leave again, this time without her. There’s no place for her here either, but it’s simple enough to build one in time.

_(They’re gone now, so she spits out the glass, swallows the last of the energon and sets to work making **herself**  happy this time.)_


	16. Can we talk about them?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and the next handful are all drabbles I wrote in response to prompts from a tumblr drabble ask meme, and they're all set back in that main Bay/TFP fusion verse.
> 
> Prompt: Can we talk about them?
> 
> For clarification here, the Gasket Sparky's speaking to is a Marvel/Headmasters-universe Gasket she's met on the Luna-1 of a Marvel/Headmasters/slightly IDW fusion version of Fort Max and Cerebros. It's not her trinemate Gasket, who is dead.
> 
> There's too many Gaskets, really lmao.

_ But I don’t make a lot of wishes, maybe none;  
_ _ I’d settle then, for you to stay by me. _

* * *

Between the two of them, Gasket usually does most of the talking, when there’s any at all. It’s not her usual behavior, he understands that–from a distance, when she doesn’t know he’s there, Sparkplug is a force of nature: a whirling dervish of emotional whiplash and obnoxious mischief in turns. There’s confidence in everything she does, even when there’s right.

Right up until she’s comfortable enough to let things slip, to drop her guard as he works metal plates into something new. Gasket lets his curiosity go, asks  _can we talk about them,_ and she shatters. (It’s not obvious, but he’s picked out the signs by now, found all the little cracks in the bravado she wears like armor against the world and all its hurts. There’s violence there, behind her optics and under her plating.

Sparky buries her talons in her own arms and doesn’t unleash it.)

“They were all the color in the universe,” she says finally, gazing at the titans in the distance. She isn’t seeing them. “All the things good about the world, it was buried inside of them–buried inside of us.” Crimson optics slide slowly to Gasket, blinking slowly.

“He was obnoxiously yellow, Gask. Neon. Alt was neon green. Stupid colors, too visible by far.“

Gasket barely vents, unwilling to break the moment. It’s the most he’s ever heard her say about the subject and he has to admit he wants to know more. Sparky pulls her talons free of her plating and stares down at the claws as she curls them slowly.

“I chased them out of the sky the day they fell and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped chasing them.”


	17. There's strength in unity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: There’s strength in unity.

_There’s strength in unity_  is an Autobot concept; it’s a tenet of their faction, a core belief that they’re better together than apart. The idea that any Autobot could become a hero by striving to help their peers.

Decepticons know there are no heroes, and the only strength to be found in unity is the power of the strong over the weak. Sparky learned this lesson early and learned it well, burning it into databanks and her personality matrix:  _There is only power and those too weak to wield it_.

Cerebros, she finds, doesn’t seem to understand this fundamental truth of the world. At least, not as she understands it. He believes in the Goodness of people, even when he shouldn’t. (She wonders, as she pokes and prods and tries to find the lie under it all, if all that patience comes from Max. He’s abnormally kind even to a ‘Con and it makes her inexplicably nervous, some cycles.)


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: It's getting worse and/or I want to keep them close.
> 
> This one's set in the same verse as last two, but a weird _Alice in Wonderland_ version of it.

“It’s getting worse,” Max murmurs to Cerebros, nothing how much wider the rift in space was than even hours before. The smaller mech just nods, visor locked on the seeker circling far above them, watching as she rips the universe apart at the seams. Threads tangle around her, as she snarls and pulls more free.

(They can’t stop her, locked into their roles in the story the way she should be, but Sparkplug’s always been a wildcard, and if she’s going to be trapped in a story it  _won’t_  be as a background character in someone else’s.)


	19. I have no memory of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: I have no memory of that.

Sparky’s wing flapped excitedly as she twirled around Fort Max, gleeful. “And since you said I could be the moon’s Official Beast Herder–”

“I have no memory of that,” Max interrupted, a smile twitching in the corner of his mouth as he tried to suppress it. “I don’t think we need one of those, they’re not actual animals you know.” He was pretty sure she was just making up titles at this point, just to see what he’d do. As fun as the game was though, he had to stop indulging her at some point, before she just owned the moon outright.

Sparky stopped twirling, giving him a  _look_. “I know that!”


	20. Can they justify it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Can they justify it?

“Can they justify it? The things the humans made Prime do.” Gasket asks her once, and Sparky laughs; it’s not a happy laugh, but a bitter one covered in sharp edges as it falls out of her mouth.

“Of course they can justify it. They can justify  _anything_ ,” she says, wings down and flared out as she remembers. “The point, Gasket, is that they  _didn’t have to_. Why would they? They told him to jump, and Murder Prime didn’t even ask how high before he was jumping through all their hoops. They never needed to give him a reason, because he never asked for one.”

Her optics are dark, something unnamed swirling behind them as she doesn’t look at him.

“The question for me isn’t  _when did my Autobots lose their faith in him_ , but  _why did they ever have any at all_?”


	21. Something’s coming to an end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Something’s coming to an end.

It’s weird, feeling her spark begin to slow inside her chest; weirder still to be able to  _see_  into her chest like that, to almost be able to reach into her own plating and pluck the spark out with her claws if she was inclined to try.

(Red-purple, she thinks fuzzily, isn’t the right color for her spark at all.

Sparks aren’t made to break like that, either but there it was.)

Max is, Sparky decides with a tired sort of resignation, being far too loud for the situation as it is. He should be quieter, should rumble instead of yell. Yelling just makes her processor ache and her wings vibrate with every syllable.

_“Shhhh_ ,” she mumbles, pating at him–or rather, she thinks she does these things, but reality might be malfunctioning, because her hands don’t really move as she intends for them to, and Max seems much further away than he was even seconds ago.

_Something’s coming to an end_ , her processor points out but Sparkplug can’t follow the thought to its end, can’t figure out why that idea is  _so important_.

(”Don’t go–!”

Was she going somewhere? She must be, because otherwise why would there be someone calling for Sparky to come back?

–they know she’ll be back, don’t they?

                                                             She always comes back.)

Max is still too loud.


	22. Where have you found that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Where have you found that?

It’s a demand and an accusation all in one when he finds her, a sharp  _where did you find that?_  cutting across the concentration she’s managed to pull together to study the badge as she rolled it in her talons.

Sparkplug looks up, blinking optics slowly at him as her concentration flees and leaves her looking between him and the insignia for a moment. “Hab,” she responds eventually, tilting it again to catch the light right before he snatches it from her fingers.

“Don’t go through my things.” It isn’t a request, and she flicks a wing in acknowledgment of the order, optics still following the badge as he tucks it away out of sight and reach.

“Is it yours?”

“No.” That’s all he’ll say though, no matter how much she pesters him about it.

(It belonged to someone, once. Sparky wonders,  _who was ever important enough to Bolt that he kept it for as long as he had?_ )


End file.
